A field guide to hecklers

The Tribune's Nina Metz and Chris Borrelli debate vocal audience members and break them down by type

January 03, 2013|By Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune reporter

Chris: You and I have spoken to enough comics to know, despite the old line that all comics are insecure and depressive, there are funny-funny comics and funny-unfunny comics, and the paradox is, both can very funny. But the heckler pulls back the curtain and reveals which kind of funny we’re looking at: The one who can write a joke and tell it well, or the one who doesn’t need carefully considered material in his head to generate a laugh. I am not judging one over the other. But I suspect this is the discomfort for Galifianakis; he is so high-concept that a heckler not only disrupts the rhythm, it grinds the whole contraption to a halt. In comparison, there is wonderful footage in Richard Pryor’s “Live on the Sunset Strip” that shows how a comedian who is naturally funny can walk the line between vaguely hostile and charming. Pryor is talking about how cold it is in Illinois. Someone shouts, inevitably, “How cold is it?” Pryor, without a pause, says, in classic Pryor whiplash, “This ain’t Johnny Carson, mother------.”

If you are honest with yourself, what is there not to like about this? As said, heckling forces ingenuity. Of course, heckling also entertains because heckling is relatively rare. Online heckling — and a general sense of snark in contemporary life — is not. An offhanded theory: We can trace contemporary, live heckling back to “The Muppets,” to Statler and Waldorf, the old guys in the box seats who heckled Fozzie? They were always funnier than Fozzie, and children are prone to repeat the behavior they witness, so ... can we draw a line from the heckling on “The Muppets” to, say, President Obama being heckled (“You lie!”) by Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina during his health care address to Congress in 2009?

A stretch? Or is this one of the lesser, obscure reasons why Obama seemed so dislocated during his first-term: He reminded us of Kermit, trying to appeal to morons in box seats who aren’t really seeking a conversation.

Nina: Statler and Waldorf are my spirit guides. I kid! If only most hecklers were as funny as those two, right? But your point is a good one, because guess what? Heckling has spilled out of the comedy club (and the ballpark, the heckler’s paradise) and even into the hushed world of golf. I know. Golf. At the Tiger Woods Challenge not long ago, pro golfer Graeme McDowell complained about a spectator who was “yabba-dabba do-ing” after every shot, which McDowell deemed “stupid” and driven by the fan’s desire for momentary fame. Galifianakis seems to understand this and usually brings his hecklers on stage. The idea being: You want to be part of the show? OK, but be careful what you wish for. “If you talk to them very quietly and interview them on stage and make them feel really terrible, that’s really good,” he said “I talk to them like a psychiatrist: ‘Why would you do that?’ Because I really want to know.”

But there are different kinds of hecklers, so let’s break this down. There’s the Happy Heckler, aka The Fan, desperate for attention from their favorite comic. Nick Kroll sees a lot of these. Kroll plays the primo jerk Ruxin on the FX fantasy football sitcom “The League” and he is booked to perform two shows at UP Comedy Club on Jan. 13. “To call it the positive heckle isn’t really true,” he told me.

I suggested that the very format of his TV show — which is really just a well-executed heckling-delivery device — could be inspiring his audiences. Maybe, Kroll said. “People just really like to shout catch phrases from the show, so I let them get it out of their system. They’re doing it because they’re psyched to see me and they like the show. If it persists, then I find a clever, non-overly hostile way of shaming that person into silence.”